“Honey, if you don’t know what I mean, then maybe it wasn’t meant for you to know just yet.”

–Imagined RuPaul-meets-Brentism (but isn’t that how most good wisdom starts?)

We’ve all heard the saying:

“You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”

And I imagine we all know what it means. Regardless of where we go, we’ll always carry with us the (gold)dust from where we’ve been.

It seems to me that the same truth surrounds naiveté. If a person is inherently innocent, chances are good that all the experience in the world will not remove the foundational greenness and unworldliness from that person.

Chances are good–actually, they’re high–that I might just be one such person.

Let me offer up some proof.

Last year, I agreed to do a talk about online dating apps for seniors. No. No. Not for high-school seniors. They know exactly how to score…or not. My talk was for bifocaled folks on the other end of the age spectrum. Senior Citizens facing a triathlon: being online, navigating dating apps, and exposing themselves to Lord knows who or where or how or when or why. At 77, I can relate.

I agreed to do the talk, and then I decided that I’d better do some research.

It was a match made in heaven. I’d get to give a talk, plus I really was on the move–or is it on the make?–for a date. Well. Whatever. I was hot for a date. Let’s just say it had been a while. A long while.

So last year, off I went. I explored bunches and bunches of dating apps. Let me pause to assure you right now–before I expose my naiveté one whit more–that I did so only in the interest of conducting genuine, in-depth research. After all, if I was going to bare all–about dating apps–in my talk, then I had to know all so that I could strut my stuff with pride.

And lo! I had hardly gotten started when I got sucked into a dating app that caused me to flutter. For the life of me, I’m not sure that I even remember its name, and I probably wouldn’t share it if I did.

Anyway, that app nearly gave me an infarction, first from possible joy and then from definite tremors. Brace yourself. R u ready? I landed on this guy right here in my neck of the woods who added RN after his first name in his profile.

Hot damn! I’m gonna get a date with a guy who’s gay AND a Registered Nurse. Joy of all joys.

With a twofer like that waiting for me, I fired off a quick reply.

He didn’t waste any time getting back to me. To my horror, I discovered that his RN wasn’t a medical credential at all. It was a time degree:

Right Now

Say whaaaat? Right now? No way. I swiped left and got rid of him RT (right then), but the shock lingered long.

Is that naiveté or what? Well. Now I know. Now, you do, too. Even at 77, I’m carrying around some genuine innocence, and I don’t even blush talking about it.

But that RN thing set me to thinking. It seems to me that I’ve always been naive, or, as country folks would say, I’ve always been green. More often than not–and with no small degree of irony–down through the years, my most blushing moments of greenness have involved language. Sometimes, it was an acronym, like RN–that I didn’t know but would never forget meeting. At other times, it was a full-blown word.

Let me tell you about two.

Growing up, I had never heard the F-word. Not whispered behind lockers. Not scrawled on bathroom stalls. Not murmured by boys trying on bravado. It simply wasn’t part of my world.

There. That didn’t hurt too much, did it? Nope. I’m ok. R u?

But the summer before heading off to college, I had to read a list of books for my Honors English Seminar that fall. I didn’t know a thing about any of them, including J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. No problem. I was dutiful. I was curious (yellow). And I was a little thrilled to be reading something vaguely subversive. Holden Caulfield’s voice quickly grabbed hold of me, tugging at some tender place inside.

Then, I got to a page that nearly made me fall down my mental stairwell:

“Somebody’d written ‘Fuck you’ on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy.”

Holden wasn’t shocked by the word. He was heartbroken. He was protective. He worried his kid sister Phoebe would see it. He worried that some other child would ask what it meant. He worried that a “dirty kid” would explain it—wrongly—and the mystery of it would wound them.

Right there. Right then. I saw a brand-new word, standing in front of me, stark naked, showing off all the strokes and flourishes of all four letters. I knew it meant something that I knew nothing about, something that I daren’t even mention to anyone. It made me pause and stare forever. Although the word never became part of my vocabulary, I did something that I had never done. I dogeared the page.

A year or two later, another word in real life was hurled squarely at me, and this time, my greenness shined even brighter not because of the word my friend said to me but because of the word that I thought he had said to me. What I heard and what he spoke were worlds apart.

He was an upperclassman, always reading, always relaxed. I liked him. Actually, I liked him a lot. Don’t get alarmed but let me tell you something: I’ve known that I was gay since I was four. For years and years–certainly, as a student at a Baptist college in WV in the 1960s–I felt like I might be the only gay guy on the planet. I had no script. I had no community. I had no way to ask:

Are you … you know … like me?

One evening, I stopped by my friend’s room–I often did, as did lots of other guys who were our friends. He was popular. He was straight. And I don’t know, maybe he thought I was gay and decided to tease me in front of the other guys–all straight like him. Out of the blue, he looked up from his book and nailed me with his baby blues:

“Every time you come into the room, I get a hard-on.”

But I didn’t hear that word.

I heard heart-on.

And my heart swelled. It fluttered. I thought he meant something warm. I thought that I had moved something in him. I thought that I mattered.

I smiled and blurted out:

“Oh stop. You do not. Show me!”

I meant it innocently and playfully. I wasn’t teasing. I was confident that he would simply pull back his buttoned shirt and show me a t-shirt emblazoned with a huge red heart–just like the iconic S that Superman sported on his chest.

I had no understanding of what my friend had said. Not then. Not in that moment. And certainly not with that word dropped so casually in a room full of guys, like it was a joke I wasn’t in on yet.

He didn’t unbutton his shirt as I thought he would. He just stared at me and then looked back at his book. The moment passed, thin as onion-skin paper.

Laughter ricocheted off the dorm room walls. All the guys were convinced that I had executed a brilliant put down by demanding:

“Show me.”

They thought that I had deliberately put my friend in his place. Little did they know. My innocence had saved the moment. Their laughter had protected me. The verbal misunderstanding had shielded me.

Looking back, I see that my innocence that evening protected me in ways I couldn’t have known at the time. I could have been humiliated. I could have been ridiculed. I could have internalized shame. But instead, I floated through the moment on a current of my own misunderstanding. I wasn’t wounded. I wasn’t exposed. I was shielded.

My mishearing gave me cover. And somehow, the laughter that followed—laughter I didn’t understand either—wrapped around me like a protective cloak. Everyone thought I was clever. Imagine that. I wasn’t. I was just green. Country green.

And yet, that greenness did something extraordinary. It saved me.

It didn’t save me from truth. It saved me from the too-muchness of it. It saved me from knowing more than I could hold at the time. It saved me from rushing into meanings I wasn’t prepared to carry. It saved me from being someone I wasn’t ready to become.

Now, I’m old enough and seasoned enough to know that innocence doesn’t prevent hurt forever. But it can delay it just long enough for us to grow strong enough to bear it. It can stretch the veil of childhood a little further into adulthood, letting us stumble forward with a safety net that keeps us from breaking into smithereens.

I guess the bottom line is that while some people grow up quickly, I didn’t. And I’m grateful. I used to think I was the only green soul who didn’t catch the drift, who didn’t get the joke, or who didn’t see the neon sign blinking right there in plain view. But over time—and Lord knows I’ve had some time, plus—I’ve come to believe I wasn’t the only one wandering through the orchard a little slow to pick the ripest fruit.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are far more of us than I ever imagined. I’m talking about folks who didn’t know what the F-word meant the first time it rang out like a firecracker. I’m talking about folks who heard hard-on and thought heart-on—and answered with a “show me.” I’m talking about folks who walked through the world, always assuming everyone meant well and most things weren’t coded for something more.

Sure. Innocence like that can get you in trouble. You miss a signal. You say the wrong thing. You walk away from something you didn’t even know was being offered. Or was it? But more often than not, innocence like that saves you. It lets you grow at your own pace. It buys you time. It keeps your heart soft while the rest of the world’s toughening up. That’s not foolishness. That’s grace in slow motion.

And when the meaning finally lands—when you finally do “get it”—you don’t feel duped. You feel ready. And you look back and laugh, and you don’t redden at all when you share those moments, just as I’m sharing here without a tinge of blush.

It seems to me there’s a kind of wisdom that comes only from a place of not knowing too soon. And bless your little heart, I’ve lived there most of my life.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Mercy me! I thought RN meant Registered Nurse, too,” or “I didn’t hear that word until college and didn’t dare say it out loud until I was grown,”—well, honey, pull up a chair and sit a spell with me, and we can while away an hour or so, side by side.

“What will we do?”

“Lands sakes alive, darling! We’ll talk.”

We’ll talk about all the pages we’ve dogeared down through the years and why. We’ll talk about people who believe what others say is more important than what they imply. We’ll talk about people like us who listen with their hearts before they learn the rest.

And when we’re done with all that, I’ll lean in real close and tell you once more that my innocence always lets me see beauty first. I’ll tell you once more that my innocence always lets me feel awe. I’ll tell you once more that my innocence always lets me believe in heart-ons.

And, honey, guess what? I still do.